Denver News

The smell of barbecue wafts through the parking lots hours before kickoff at Arrowhead Stadium, and when the first salvo of fireworks explode overhead, thousands of Chiefs fans begin to march en masse toward the entrance gates.

That’s how things normally are on an NFL game day in Kansas City.

But these days, very little is normal, and like so many things in life the football season ahead is rife with uncertainty. The coronavirus pandemic that brought sports to a standstill for months has everyone wondering what games will be like when spectators are finally allowed back in — and whether they will even want to show up.

Professor Asad Aziz is holding a classroom discussion in a graduate-level class on international business.

There are maybe two dozen or so students in his classroom on Colorado State University’s campus in Fort Collins. Thirty 30 or 40 more are participating online when he decides to break the class into small-groups for discussion.

He counts off groups of four in the classroom and matches them up, then looks up at the giant video display at the front of the room showing his remote students in a Zoom- or Microsoft Teams-type display, from which he creates eight to 10 more small groups, setting up meeting rooms for each. Aziz can drop in on any of the conversations at any point to check on their progress and answer questions.

Every month during the school year, CBS4, along with Colorado School of Mines & PDC Energy, award the Future Leaders award to a high school student, who is excelling in the STEM fields. CBS4 is committed to recognizing those students even while they’re learning from home.

The Future Leader winner for May is Andrew Woen, a rising senior at Peak to Peak Charter School. While he excels at his classes, Woen is already working to help the world around him.

“If I really do want to establish a feeling that I’m there, then there needs to be some capacity for me to make a decision to move myself forwards, backwards, around and in doing that, for there to be a response. The responsiveness and that resonance has to be established and maintained in order for it to feel like a live event.”- Jessica Brillhart, Director of USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies MxR (mixed reality) Lab.

What will sports, and sports fandom, look like in a post COVID-19 world? While states across America and countries around the world continue to re-open, large gatherings remain a non-starter. The sports events and live concerts of old, in which tens or hundreds of thousands of fans all crowded into a stadium, appear a long ways off.

When PCs for People first announced its plans to open up a community tech hub in Denver back in February, the organization couldn’t have predicted just how critical technology would become in the coming months.

As COVID-19 sweeps the nation — upending nearly every facet of American life along its path — having internet-connected devices has been seen by many as the country’s only saving grace.

Boulder County health workers are having trouble getting some people to share information needed to track the progress of the coronavirus, at a time when such information is critical to public health and key to the county’s recovery from the ongoing pandemic.

“I would say it’s an increasing trend, particularly among our Spanish speaking population of residents,” Boulder County Public Health spokesperson Chana Goussetis.

“I think it’s related to immigration status, as well as concerns about joblessness, concerns that if someone is identified as exposed to COVID, that their employer would then fire them, even if they don’t have any symptoms or haven’t tested positive themselves.”

As the pandemic swept through the nation, America’s businesses had to reevaluate their approach to everything from their employees and customers to the greater community. Many shut offices and shifted work online; others overhauled sick leave and dependent care policies; some increased pay or gave bonuses. For at least a time, the paramount concern for most corporations was not just profit and the bottom-line.

The new Forbes Corporate Responders ranking assesses how well the 100 largest employers among U.S. public companies responded to the public health crisis. It is a snapshot in time, analyzing companies’ policies from mid-March through May 7 across 22 categories, from relaxed attendance policies to community relief funds, on a rising scale of 1 to 5. The numbers were then averaged into an overall composite score. Verizon came out on top with a score of 3.87.

The Clearwing Group’s employees work behind the scenes at music f­estivals, national concert tours and other live events across America, building stages and creating audiovisual spectacles that feature swirling lights, d­igital sound and live video.

But support for these large-scale productions takes good planning and close coordination among Clearwing’s employees, who are spread across three offices. To improve communication, the company’s IT staff recently installed Logitech Tap videoconferencing equipment in its meeting rooms.

Right now the term “telehealth” is everywhere. What does it look like for behavioral health and what are some reasons people might choose to engage in telehealth treatment?

While telehealth has been around for a long time, it has gained visibility during the Covid-19 pandemic, and some rules around its application have been temporarily relaxed. The result? Telehealth is more accessible right now.

Facebook takes more steps to support and expand a remote workforce, IBM announces layoffs and TechCrunch’s big annual conference is going virtual. (I know, I know — I have mixed feelings about it, too.)

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